Solution: God of fertility, agriculture and the afterlife - NYT Crossword

I should confess that I still did not have the answer to 1A, so I ignored it and moved across to “God of fertility, agriculture and the afterlife.” There are six letters, so not Hades or Pluto, but neither quite fits that description anyway. Maybe a Hindu deity: Shiva, the destroyer and creator. Again, not enough letters. I was panicking just a little, not too loudly, when my husband said, “How about Ganesh?” He knows that I have a special affection for Ganesh, known for his sweet tooth and depicted in both two dimensions and three with a round belly. What we didn’t know was that he was, among other things, the god of overcoming obstacles: the perfect object of devotion for the crossword solver and constructor. I knew Ganesh wasn’t right, but I filled it in anyway, just so the top of the grid would look less naked, and I hoped that Ganesh would help remove the obstruction that was blocking me from remembering the correct answer: the Egyptian god OSIRIS.